Trauma Brought Us Together When We Were 16, 18, 21, 25. I Don’t Know What Brings Us Together Now.

Illustration by Rebecca Fassola After a week of mutual antagonisms, we fought it out in the bathroom on the second floor. We were fighting over a boy whose name need not be remembered. We were fighting over erasure, I guess, over the visceral haunting of scarcity, over the idea that neither of us would be good enough if the other lived. Both scrappy, but one decidedly faster and a bit more practiced than the other, we went round for round with our friends holding each other back and reminding anyone who dared enter that anything but a fair fight was strictly forbidden. In fury and haste, we shoved each other up against the bathroom walls, one slamming the other into the mirror, both of us aiming punches toward any soft spot on the body we could find. After a few bloody lips (and a near concussion), a dean who wasn’t afraid to enter the girl’s room finally came in to break us up. I don’t remember much about the aftermath; we were in detention together and didn’t speak. But a few weeks later I found myself in her living room, sharing food with her twin brother as 50 Cent blasted down the hallway over the sound of the husband next door attempting to bang down the wall. I don’t know how it became this way, but in almost no time since the scrappy hour we spent trying to tear each other’s hairs straight out of the follicle, we became best friends. Violence has its poetics.  I don’t know what drew her to me but I know what drew me to her. Even if you end up hating their guts, when someone beats your ass fair and square you come away with some sizable respect. She won our fight, hands down, though she’d say I put up a fair one. I think she respected that, despite her notoriety, I wasn’t afraid. I think she also respected that I gave her a black eye.  We spoke the language of loyalty. A friend who would fight alongside you came easy, but a friend who would fight for you was harder to find. C would fight for me. If there were snickers on the bus (for no good reason, it was 2005 and I was super duper fly) she would ask: “Is there a problem? Because if so, we have time…” In the lunchroom, when a rumor began that girls C beefed with over the summer planned on jumping her, I jumped over the table to throw the first hit–they needed to know she wasn’t alone and we wasn’t no punk ass bitch. And on weekends when my mother freed me of my eldest sister duties, it was her block I would rush to, my hair laid and name belt visible, to sit in the sweltering city heat to drink and laugh and wait. We waited for chaos because it was inevitable. We waited for chaos because it waited for us.  And we were not gentle with each other. If she was in a mood, we fought. If I had something to say, I said it. Our fights were about simple things: Why you actin’ different because [so-and-so] around? We would fight and make up like sisters but no fight was ever like that first fight. Because we became each other’s necessity. Our bond was genuine and we were at peace with the fact that there would be no peace when we were together. We were hoodrats, straight out the cut. We smoked bogeys and blunts and stole full-fare Metrocards from the library so…